One of the mayor updates since PHP 5.0 is upcoming with the 5.3 version, this is also a major step forward to PHP 6 - I love to have namespaces and appreciate the split of E_NOTICE and E_DEPRECATED. Also other features like the native MySQL support ( I hope this really raises the performance), the array_replace/array_replace_recursive functions and also dynamic calls to static functions “$classname::$functionname($parameter);” sound very cool. So I really look forward to have it on the server (or at least on my laptop) :P
Regarding the namespaces I’ve one idea: maybe someday someone will invent a common namespace “php::clean” which fixes all the small inconsistencies within function-names and parameter-styles … that would be really great ;)
A nice article with a more detailed look into namespaces and the other inventions in 5.3 can be found on sitepoint.com